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June 18, 2015 06:49 AM UTC

Thursday Open Thread

  • 28 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”

–Arthur Miller

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28 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

  1. Gee, it's like industry was purposefully inflating its jobs and benefit, and the state and media just went along for the ride. Or something.

    http://www.eenews.net/energywire/2015/06/18/stories/1060020433 (subscription required)

    "Pennsylvania's reassessment of statewide oil and gas employment numbers has earned the praise of groups that were previously critical of those counts.

    Under the leadership of new Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, the state Department of Labor & Industry (L&I) last week quietly revised its methodology for counting the number of workers employed in the Marcellus Shale, finding an increase of 23,478 in the past seven years. [snip]

    …But those figures were far higher under the department's former approach: For the third quarter of 2013, L&I estimated that total employment in the Marcellus Shale-related industries reached 237,741. Last week, the department said the sector contributed only 89,314 jobs during the same period in 2014."

    1. Colorado did the same thing, and Hick's office broadcast the inflated figures. Hick was an oil and gas man before he was a bar owner, before he was a mayor, before he was Governor, and that's still where his loyalties lie.

      Hick recently melted down on CPR, stating that the ColoWyo mine had "nothing to do with climate change", even though climate change impacts (new EPA regs) are exactly one of the reasons that coal is becoming too expensive to mine.

      His office claimed 220,000 oil and gas jobs would be affected by a fracking ban, which nobody was proposing at that point. The real figures, even in the O&G boom were much lower. The 2012 Leeds study (table 10, pg 12) showed only 26,000 direct drilling and extraction jobs in Colorado. To get to that 220,000 figure, they had to include anyone who said "gas" in the course of a day's work, as in "How much gas would you like to buy?" "That's a gas range, not an electric one". "Some people say that too much tofu gives you gas."

      Bottom line: We can't trust former industry pros to give us real data, or even tell the truth, about oil and gas jobs and the environment.

      1. "Bottom line: We can't trust former industry pros to give us real data, or even tell the truth, about oil and gas jobs and the environment"

        Seriously? I'll bet every major environmental group in the country employs "former industry pros". I'd even go further and say that it's dumb not to. They're the ones that know where the bodies are, so to speak. 

        And taken in their entirely, Hick's comments are probably accurate: "…he says the way to reduce the amount of coal burned is by lowering demand, through renewable energy mandates and more use of natural gas, steps Colorado is already taking." Personally, I'd add a carbon tax to that, which would also lower demand. The point is that it's probably more effective to achieve this goal by tweaking market forces rather than through the court orders. 

        I love what you do MJ, but I disagree on this point. 

        1. Points taken, ajb.

          There are plenty of former O&G industry pros who do great work in the environmental field. In my opinion, Hick just isn't one of those. But I shouldn't have generalized to all former O&G experts.

          Same thing with the CPR article. I read the headline, skimmed, got lazy, didn't include the entire context.  Still don't trust Hickenlooper to do the right thing with the Colowyo mine – he's too busy covering his ass so people don't blame him for "losing jobs".

          Working on something else. Thanks for your corrections.

          1. Personally, I think you have to look at Hick as an engineer, as in:

            The pessimist sees the glass half empty.
            The optimist see the glass half full.
            The engineer sees a glass twice as big as it needs to be.

  3. The non-stop racism and hatred spewed by right wingers, most notably the kind repeated over Public Owned Airwaves nearly 24/7, and on multiple radio stations in almost every market, has its desired consequences:

    Several people were killed in a shooting at an historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, a source close to the investigation told CNN.

    The shooter is still at large.

    The shooting took place Wednesday evening at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest AME church in the South.

    Police haven't said how many people have been shot. But the source who spoke to CNN said several bodies were in the church that were yet to be identified.

    "It's really bad. It's a very bad scene," local pastor Thomas Dixon said.

    "Apparently the person just entered the church and opened fire. That part has not been fully articulated on what happened yet … they are still looking for the suspect."

    I'm guessing he's a Mark Levin/Rush Limbaugh listener. Maybe a fan of Donald Trump for President.

    Levin station: http://tunein.com/radio/1250-WTMA-s23196/

    Limbaugh: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/stations/south_carolina

    Levin was gushing over Trump yesterday….

    1. 9 people killed, including the pastor, who was also a State Senator.

      Who knows what he listened to, his FB profile picture shows him in a jacket with Apartheid-era white government flags, and he is reported to have said "you rape our women and you take over our country and you have to go".

      Nope – not racist. It must be something else.

      1. The gun was a gift from his uncle for his birthday back in April. No word on the uncle's thoughts on race, or his thinking in giving a gun to a young man with drug problems and a recent criminal history.

        The racism could run in the family, or he could have picked it up in prison, or any number of other places.

        1. I hope you're not saying the non-stop vitriol and lies and racism aimed at Obama, and African-Americans and Hispanics and Muslims has no effect. I know it does: my own brother has been filled with rage fueled by these guys and their lies and very little real world evidence – yet he can repeat the dogma as if on cue.

          Just imagine if Gunny Bob was on the air still.

          You can relieve them of the responsibility for the lies they repeat many times a day……I won't.

          1. I'm saying that hate radio may not have had effect on this person. Radio is certainly not the only place you can hear racist violent speech, and we are wiser for avoiding the thought that we'll eliminate the problem by eliminating free if disgusting speech in a single broadcast medium.

            1. Sure it's everywhere. But it's most prevalent on Conservative talk radio. Who do KKK members listen to? More likely Savage than Hartmann.

      2. I'm sure our ammosexual friends would say that guns do not kill people, people kill people.

        He's not a racist…..he's just defending traditional values in the red state which has given us the likes of John C. Calhoun, Fort Sumter, Strom Thurmond, and Lee Atwater. 

         

      1. Charles Pierce:

        What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is "unspeakable." We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was. We should speak of it as racial violence, which is what it was.

        We should speak of it as an attack on history, which it was. This was the church founded by Denmark Vesey, who planned a slave revolt in 1822. Vesey was convicted in a secret trial in which many of the witnesses testified after being tortured. After they hung him, a mob burned down the church he built. His sons rebuilt it. On Wednesday night, someone turned it into a slaughter pen.

        We should speak of it as an assault on the idea of a political commonwealth, which is what it was. And we should speak of it as one more example of all of these, another link in a bloody chain of events that reaches all the way back to African wharves and Southern docks. It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.

        Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them. Let Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, look out her window at the flag of treason that is flown proudly at her state capitol and think about these things, and speak of them, before she pronounces herself so puzzled at how something like this could happen in South Carolina, the home office of American sedition.

        Let Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush, both of whom want to lead this troubled country, consider what it meant to absent themselves from campaign events in Charleston and think of these things and speak of them before they turn to their consultants about whether or not staying in a grieving city was what a leader should have done.

        Let the elite political media that follows the two of them, roughly thrown into a maelstrom of actual news, look out onto the streets of Charleston and realize that politics exist for the purpose of governing a country, and not simply to entertain it.

        Let Squint and the Meat Puppet (he's referring to Joe Scarborough and Mika B.) think about these things and speak of these things before inviting Donald Trump, who is a clown and a fool, to come on national television and talk about his hair.

        Not to think about these things is to betray the dead.

        Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them.

        Think about what happened. Think about why it happened. Talk about what happened. Talk about why it happened. Do these things, over and over again. The country must resist the temptation present in anesthetic innocence. It must reject the false comfort of learned disbelief and the narcotic embrace of concocted surprise.

        There is a ferocious underground fire running through American history. It rages unseen until it flares again from the warm earth. It has raged from the death of Denmark Vesey in 1822 to the death of the Reverend and state senator Clementa Pinckney on Wednesday night.

        Only the fire is not underground. It's in the air, literally. It travels many miles and lands directly within earshot of many millions. It might be fanned by words meant to misconstrue, meant to confuse. But those who are susceptible to the message hear it loud and clear. And when they act, the act is clear in the message it sends. Unless you pretend it doesn't………. 

    3. Just being reported: shooting at another black church in Memphis. Shots were apparently fired at the building, no-one hurt. Different MO than last night's attack, though in theory it could be the same guy – just within the realm of possibility if he was able to drive without detours.

  4. President Obama pointed out the really obvious today in commenting about Charleston: Things like this do not happen in other countries. How long before one of the right wing morons (my guess is Sarah Palin or the Donald) cites this observation to question his patriotism? 

      1. Northern Ireland, if you must know, has been largely free of The Troubles since 2007. Its murder rate per capita is about half of that of the US if you count them as a separate country (they're officially still part of the UK, which has a murder rate 1/4 that of the US).

        The problems in Israel are largely due to the occupation and international relations and, if the truth be told, Israel is most like the US in its attitudes toward guns and violence as a solution to problems.

        The Balkans are still recovering from the 1990's. I wouldn't count them as stable.

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